The Internet has facilitated a more dispersed business environment by allowing employees, vendors, and customers to communicate and conduct business via e-mail and/or audio (telephone conferencing) techniques. However, such information exchange mechanisms lack the benefit of the more personal face-to-face contact that can provide a more effective and productive environment.
Existing video conferencing systems provide a limited view of a participant's work environment and are even less effective when the meeting requires drawings or sketching on a whiteboard, for example. Moreover, with the increasing numbers of user coming online and passing large files associated with multimedia content, the available bandwidth of existing networks is becoming even more burdened. Accordingly, businesses are continually seeking more effective means for video communications.
Panoramic cameras for wide-angle viewing find application not only for leisure, but also for personal reasons, home security, travel, gaming applications, and business meetings. With respect to business meetings, panoramic cameras can be utilized to record and broadcast meetings by recording not only the video images of the meeting environment, but also by providing a microphone array for recording audio input so viewers can see and hear most of what is happening.
Multi-camera (or omnidirectional) panoramic camera systems require calibration to ultimately be able to stitch the individual images together to make a seamless panoramic image. One conventional technique uses a brute-force approach by learning an arbitrary warp image from the cameras to the panoramic image. While very generic, this calibration technique is difficult to setup, includes a non-parametric file that is very large (on the order of megabytes), and impacts manufacturing production by taking a relatively long time (e.g., an hour or more) to complete, while providing little or no feedback to the manufacturer on the camera mechanics (e.g., lens/mirror alignment).